Bethel teacher and 3 students return from month on James River

Grant Gibson gives a celebratory smack with his paddle after arriving at Old Point Comfort Marina at Fort Monroe after completing a 28 day, 340 mile paddle down the James River.

Grant Gibson gives a celebratory smack with his paddle after arriving at Old Point Comfort Marina at Fort Monroe after completing a 28 day, 340 mile paddle down the James River. (Adrin Snider, Daily Press)

Four weeks ago, a Bethel High School teacher and three students climbed into canoes near the West Virginia border and began a 28-day journey down the James River.

Friday morning, they were in a huddle of 16 students and teachers at Sunset Creek in Hampton preparing for the final hour of their journey.

"I have one question," a student in the group of 16 said quietly. "Who are we?"

"JRE!" boomed the group, spelling the initials for the James River Expedition, a first-ever journey down the 340 miles of the waterway that began in Iron Gate which is near north of Roanoke near the West Virginia border. It was organized by the James River Association and sponsored with a $50,000 grant from Dominion Resources.

Bethel teacher Troy Thompson and rising sophomores Rebecca Henderson, Isaiah Ralph and Grant Gibson were one of the teams from four schools selected for the trip by the association.

They joined schools from Richmond, Charlottesville and Richmond. Teachers and students participated in water quality monitoring, river resource mapping and watershed restoration efforts, all led by James River Association staff.

By the trip's end Friday, the group had paddled nine canoes through rising tides, thunderstorms and raging rapids together while learning about the river's history and stopping at points along the way.

Stops included a riverside farm that's a model in agricultural conservation and a power plant that is investing in cleaner air and water.

Each night the group slept in the wilderness, sometimes on islands with no road access where it was just them and their equipment surrounded by water.

Two women served as land support, following them and providing meals daily. Gibson said he ate peanut butter and jelly wraps about three times a day and is ready to say goodbye to tortillas for a while.

On Friday, as the group of prepared to paddle from Sunset Creek to Fort Monroe to reunite with their families, students took time to leave their mark on an item that followed them through the trip.

Grabbing a red marker, each autographed the wooden portable toilet, dubbed "the throne," with a brief message.

"Thanks for being in the woods with me," Gibson wrote with a flourish, dating the message "July 2011."

The dozen students formed an indelible bond on the trip, Henderson said, which made saying goodbye Friday sad and bittersweet. The trip was studded with the unexpected, she added.

"We saw a baby calf on the bank that had fallen and was bleeding," she said. "We strapped two life jackets on him, and all of us pushed him up the bank."

Then the group took a three-mile hike looking for a farmer, she said, before eventually leaving a note on a shed about the calf's whereabouts.

Another day, a ferocious thunderstorm spitting hail caught the group on the water. They moored their canoes, ran into the forest and squatted down with each person gripping part of a giant tarp above their heads.

Under it, they laughed and sang made-up songs until the storm passed.

Trip leader Gabe Silver, an environmental educator with the James River Association, said his goal was for the trip to be a safe place where the teens could be themselves.

Outside of the high school setting, he said, they didn't have to keep up any appearances or "fronts."

When a student from Lynchburg told Silver he wished he'd been less emotional on the trip, Silver told the student he was glad he let his feelings play out.

Silver said a wide range of sentiments ruled the trip: "Anger, fear, empathy as people opened up about what was hard for them, compassion, a lot of good humor, resilience and a full sense of being alive, of being filled up by the people around you and the world you're in."

His hope, he said, is that the trip serves as a template for the students of how to take on an ambitious plan and work together in small groups to achieve it.

"This showed that ambition can be achieved," he said. "That anything is possible."

Ralph, the rising Bethel sophomore, said he learned that if you avoid risks in life, you'll miss out on a lot.

So as his raft tipped forward and he plunged through a rapid during the trip, he said he grabbed on for dear life and screamed.